Slam!

by Walter Dean Myers

  The car was a tough-looking silver Benz. It had a leather interior and a wood dashboard. It was definitely on the money.

  Ice and one girl, Bianca, sat in the front seat of the car and me and the other girl, the one with the tight pants, sat in the back. Her name was Ceil but she said everybody called her ‘Kicky.’ Hey, that was cool with me.

  Kicky sat right next to me and, when Ice put his arm around Bianca, Kicky snuggled up to me and I put mine around her.

  “You got strong,” Ice said as we headed down toward the Triboro Bridge. “You used to get up but you didn’t get up so smooth.”

  “I did some weight workouts over the summer,” I said. “I was calling you.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I could see the outline of Ice’s head in the dark car. “But I was running here and there over the summer, you know, trying to get paid.”

  “I hear that.”

  We started joking about Ice running for mayor of New York and me running for governor. Ice said we should go for the ex-convict vote.

  “You got more people been in jail in New York than been in college,” Bianca said. “I read that in the newspaper.”

  “You going to be a Republican or a Democrat?” Kicky asked.

  “I’m running on the Salami Party ticket,” Ice said. “That’s just one step past the Baloney Party.”

  Ice stopped off to see a guy he knew off Merrick Boulevard. He just popped in for a minute and then popped out and then we stopped at a place to get some ice cream. It was cold but we still wanted it. We were sitting there when Ice asked me if I thought that Carver and Latimer were going to play for the championship.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You see any of the other teams play?”

  “We played St. Peter’s and just beat them,” he said. “We would have killed them if the referees didn’t call a foul every time you looked at one of them. We ain’t played nobody yet that we couldn’t mess over.”

  I didn’t know if that sounded good for Latimer or not. Ice went on talking about this white boy who played for Trinity. He didn’t look like he could play. He wore a pony tail in the back and had the sides of his head shaved. Ice said he looked like a freak but he could really hoop.

  The waitress came over and asked if we wanted anything else and Bianca wanted another soda and Kicky asked if smoking was allowed.

  “No, because the owner got asthma,” the waitress said. “He used to smoke more than anybody before he got it, too.”

  “I’m going out in the car and grab a smoke,” Kicky said. Then she turned to me. “You want to come out and wait with me?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  “We’ll wait for you out there,” Kicky said. She started getting up.

  “Yeah, okay.” Ice grinned and tossed me the keys. “But don’t be steaming up the windows.”

  I opened the door and we got into the backseat. I didn’t like being around people smoking but I didn’t mind it some of the time. Kicky lit up her cigarette and offered me one.

  “No, I got to play ball,” I said.

  “I’m thinking of giving it up,” she said. “But I’m afraid if I stop smoking I’ll start gaining a lot of weight.”

  “Yeah, I hear what you saying.”

  “And my mother is like so heavy her whole life is going whack,” Kicky said. She went through her bag and pulled out a portable tape player. “Who you like to listen to?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I change up a lot.”

  “You like Seal?”

  “He’s okay,” I answered.

  “I think he’s nasty-looking,” she said, smiling.

  “He looks all right to me,” I said.

  When she puffed on the cigarette the tip glowed in the dark. She blew out some smoke and gave me a smile and put the cigarette back in her mouth. Mtisha came into my mind. It would have been great if she had been in the car with me.

  “If you didn’t have that cigarette in your mouth I’d give you a big kiss,” I said.

  “Get out of here with that corny line,” she said. “You look like one of them shy guys anyway. You know, I hate shy boys.”

  “I’m not that shy,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything great to say so I tried to look cool, like I knew something. She just looked at me and smiled. She looked better when she was smiling and I threw her a smile back.

  “Give me the keys,” Kicky said.

  She leaned over the front seat, fumbled with the radio and got it on. Somebody was singing something about ‘Hold on my heart’ or something like that.

  “Why don’t you crack the windows in front?” she said. “Then show me how not that shy you are?”

  Something said to leave it alone, to go on back to where Ice and Bianca were. The problem was doing it without looking lame. I reached over and hit the button that rolled down the front window.

  “So what you got to say for yourself?” Kicky scooted down in the seat. She was short and I figured she could have laid out on that backseat.

  “Where did Ice get the car?” I asked her.

  “I think it’s his cousin’s,” she said. “You like this song?”

  I didn’t want to think about the car, so instead of answering Kicky I just leaned over and started kissing her. She was just lying back when I first kissed her but then she wrapped one of her legs around me and started tongue kissing me. She was something else. She didn’t even know me but she was kissing me as if we had a thing going on and I thought I could have done anything to her that I wanted to. We must have kissed for about I don’t even know how long before Ice and Bianca came to the car.

  “I ought to charge you people rent,” Ice said.

  They kept the windows cracked and we drove around for about an hour more. It felt good sitting in the back of a nice machine with Kicky sitting in my lap kissing on me while Ice cruised around. I think it was something about us being in the dark looking out on the world, moving through the universe without being seen, our private wheels, our private space flight.

  In between kissing on me Kicky was running her mouth with Bianca about some movie they had seen. It was almost as if I was background activity. Sometimes Ice got into the conversation but mostly it was just them talking to each other and Ice talking to me.

  “We ought to get us a team,” Ice said. “Remember that time we had the Great Five?”

  “Yeah, we were going to play together and get great and then when we grew up we were going to join the NBA.”

  “That was a good idea,” Ice said. “We just didn’t know that you couldn’t join the NBA.”

  “Ice, did you tell Bianca about that perfume?” Kicky asked.

  “Yeah,” Ice said. “Guy got the oils, you know, to make the perfume. He can match all the top brands. Anything you want he got for a pound an ounce.”

  “Me and Ice was thinking about getting some labels and making up some perfume for the black woman,” Kicky said. “Then maybe we can get some guys to sell it outside the subways and stuff.”

  “How come you always got to have business with my man?” Bianca said.

  “Don’t even go there, girl,” Kicky said. “Because nothing between me and Ice is on the program so you know it’s not happening.”

  “Well, I just don’t like to meet nothing that’s my business coming round no corner,” Bianca said.

  “Hey, it’s business,” Ice said. “My nature don’t come down for no stock exchange.”

  “That’s all your nature’s been coming down for lately,” Bianca said.

  “Yeah, right.” Ice looked at Bianca and stepped on the gas. “I need to take you home, woman. You need to have stayed in your crib this morning if you woke up with an attitude that wrong.”

  We drove to Bianca’s house on 137th Street and then we drove up to Eighth Avenue and 148th where Kicky lived. She lived one flight up and I walked her to her door. She kissed me again and told me how disappointed she was going to be if I didn’t call her.

  “Maybe we can double deal with Ice
and Bianca if you and her make up,” I said.

  “She ain’t mad at me because she know I don’t mess with her man,” Kicky said. “Maybe she got her month or something, I don’t really know. You hear what I’m saying?”

  I said I would call her and went on back downstairs to where Ice was waiting. I hopped into the front seat and we started driving around some more. It was like old times a little. He was telling me about his dreams and stuff. Mostly it was about how he was going to be in the NBA and get all the babes.

  “The bucks you make in the NBA go past heavy,” Ice said. “They get all the way to super light. You know why they super light?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t have to carry nothing around with you,” he said. “All you carry is maybe four or five credit cards and pay everything with that. You walk into a store, you see a suit, and Bam! you order three of them—no, you order six of them in three different colors. You get your blue, your brown, and your gray. Then every time you fall out you fall out kicking. That’s the way to live, my man.”

  “Drive around in a big ’chine like this one,” I said.

  “This ain’t nothing,” Ice said. “It belongs to this guy I know. I’m thinking about hooking up a Lexus. You know, get the basic model and then customize it. Put some way-out stuff in it, a CD changer, maybe a camcorder so I can record anything I pass. You ain’t never seen no car with a built in camcorder.”

  “Hey, I hear you.”

  Ice drove me on home and I watched as he cruised away. The guy was exciting. I wondered what Mtisha would say if I cruised up in a Benz.

  When I got home my moms was up doing the crossword puzzle. She said it was a stupid puzzle and she was going on to bed.

  “Where were you?”

  “Ice had to go out to Queens and I rode with him,” I said.

  “Ice has a car?” she asked, her arms folded in front of her.

  “It was a friend’s car,” I said. “But he wheeled it like it was his sneakers.”

  “You boys should have been brothers,” Moms said. “The way you get along with each other.”

  I gave her a peck on the cheek and headed for the crash zone. The chance for me to talk to Ice came and went and I didn’t get up the nerve to talk to him. What was I going to say that he didn’t know? Watch your back? Don’t fall into no cracks? He didn’t talk like he was dealing crack. Anyway, crack was the wrong road and anybody that lived in the hood knew where that was at, you don’t have to teach fish to deal with water.

  That was what my whole life was getting to be about, dealing with stuff going wrong that I knew about.

  Mom came into my room with a Swiss cheese and tomato sandwich and asked if she could talk with me a while.

  “So I’m going to have to work harder on the books,” I said because I knew that was what was on her mind.

  “Sometimes you can try something real hard,” she said, “but you just can’t get it all by yourself.”

  “You saying the teachers can’t teach?” I asked.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she said. “Just think about it. Maybe we can talk about it again?”

  “Sure.”

  “You played good tonight,” she said, standing in the doorway. “Everybody in the stands around me was talking about you. I was so proud.”

  “I didn’t even know you were there,” I said.

  “I’m always there,” she said. “And I’ll always be there.”

  “Yo, I know that,” I said. I sat up and pulled the spread around my shoulders. In the other bed Derek turned over and mumbled something in his sleep. When he was asleep his voice was deeper than when he was awake.

  “Greg, I didn’t mean to put your father down,” she said. Her voice was soft. “And you certainly don’t have to deal with Mr. Randall. I mentioned him to your father, today. I told him that Mr. Randall was an engineer and that he could help you with your math. He didn’t seem to mind, but the decision is up to you. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She blew me a kiss and closed the door.

  I thought about the game. The feel of the ball in my hands was still there. I don’t tell a lot of people but I like the little pebbles on the ball, the way they feel against my fingertips. Once I told Mtisha that the way the ball felt, the pebbles and the roundness where the seams are, almost felt like a woman to me. She said I must be hanging out with some hard-butt women. But later she came and said she was sorry. Never did figure out what she was sorry about.

  Then there was me cruising with Ice. I took the ticket about the car being his friend’s but I didn’t go for the show. People don’t just lend you a Benz because they think you’re cool. Still, it was nice cruising around like that, just taking it like it comes. You sitting in the back of a car with your homeboy and maybe some babes and things just peace out for you.

  Then I pushed my head back to the basketball game again and I couldn’t wait to get to school the next day to see what everybody was saying. Getting to sleep was hard.

  So we had to do this school project and we had to have a partner. Who I end up with is Margie. Her real name is Marjorie Flatley and I don’t like her because she thinks she cute. She’s got blonde hair and real big brown eyes. She plays piano, vibes, marimba, and anything else she can bang on. She’s good, too. But she’ll lay a diss on you like she’s doing you a favor.

  “So what do you want to do?” she asked me.

  “I want to make a video,” I said. “You know, how I live and stuff like that. What do you want to do?”

  “I can deal with a documentary,” she said. “You ever watch public television?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we’ll get a video camera from the school’s video department and shoot something,” she said. She had a brush that had a mirror on the back of it and was checking herself out in the mirror and brushing her hair while she was talking.

  “The story of Slam the Great,” I said.

  “That’s okay. You can do the shooting,” she said. “You do everything that’s important to your life. Your neighborhood, your house, and where you shop and things like that. And then I’ll edit it. The school has an editing machine. You have to shoot a lot of tape, like maybe ten hours. If you shoot a lot of tape I can edit it down to thirty minutes and put music to it.”

  “That’s cool.”

  So that’s how we decided what we were going to do. Me and Marge. I wasn’t that down for working with Marge but it was something to do.

  “Yo, Slam.” It was Ducky.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I may not be on the team much longer,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders and got this crooked grin on his face.

  “How come?”

  “Glen said about five more guys came to the gym today and asked about being on the team,” Ducky said. “After they saw you play the other night they all want to be on the team.”

  “So what’s that got to do with you?” I asked. “You’re already on the team.”

  “They’ll probably play better than me,” Ducky said. “Or if I don’t get kicked off the team then I probably won’t get to play anymore.”

  “You can play better than you’re playing,” I said. “You just got to work on it during practice, especially the way you handle the ball. You act like you’re scared out there.”

  “Yeah.”

  He got his books out of his locker and went on down the hallway. It’s funny the way some guys think they can just come out and play ball and don’t work at it. And the way he walked away you could see he wasn’t even going to try. He had it in his head that he wasn’t going to make it.

  The video department is on the fourth floor and I went there and told them I wanted to borrow a camera. They said I had to go down to the library and get a slip from Miss Fowell before I could get one. So I go down to the library and wait for like ten minutes for Miss Fowell to get back from somewhere and I asked her for a slip so I could get a video camera. Then she tells me
I got to get a slip from Mr. Parrish, my English teacher, before she gives me a slip.

  It was a little funny, really. I had to get a slip to get a slip to get a camera. So I tracked down Mr. Parrish and told him what I needed and he told me that he already gave Margie a slip.

  So then I find Margie. No, first I found Vicky Garcia and told her I was looking for Margie and Vicky asked me if I was sweating Margie. Now what would I look like sweating Margie?

  “No, I just need to get something from her,” I said.

  “She said you were always checking her out,” Vicky said. “I don’t know. Now you going round looking for her and everything.”

  Anyway, she told me that Margie was in the cafeteria because she had a early lunch.

  On the way to the cafeteria five people stopped me to talk about the game and about nine or ten people waved to me. Yo, I wasn’t just on the scene, I was the scene. Yeah. Even Miss Meade, the school nurse, stopped me and said she had heard about the game.

  “I don’t know how people can jump high enough to throw the ball down into the basket,” she said.

  That was cool. It wasn’t true, but it was cool. She knew that guys slammed the pill, but she just said that to make me feel good. I felt good.

  The day before the game everybody was looking at me like I was nothing and then after the game I was the man. It wasn’t something that fell on me, either. It was me, burning on the court, doing the wild thing with the ball, slamming and jamming. Me. Just how bad I felt when they were looking at me like I wasn’t nothing was just how good I felt when Miss Meade was talking to me.

  When I left her I started thinking about some new moves. That was what I was thinking about and then I was thinking about facing Carver and going up against Ice. That was going to be a challenge. Ice could do everything but I couldn’t let him get my game. I had to be ready when I went up against him.

  It made me mad what Vicky said about me sweating Margie. I could see me sweating Vicky. Vicky was Puerto Rican and like super fine. You take away Margie’s eyes and she wasn’t anything special. Maybe she was sweating me. When I found out I was going to be working the project with her I thought it was just the way things were but maybe she worked it that way. Sometimes she was checking me out, too. It could have been like a Romeo and Juliet thing with her loving me the first time she saw me and thinking that we could be like big-time moviemakers and then go to Hollywood and be stars and whatnot. We could show up at the Oscars in a stretch limo and she’d be wearing this gown and I’d be in a tuxedo. That worked.